Advancements in technology have made the distribution of information a more convenient task. Computer networks, satellites, telephone systems and communication networks such as the Internet provide many tools to communicate information. As a result of the ability to conveniently distribute information, organizations have incorporated these technology advancements into their operations. One tool used in the mass distribution of information is to have distribution lists. These lists contain several names or entries that simultaneously receive information from a source. A side effect of the increasing number of potential data recipients is the difficultly in coordinating data delivery to a wide audience, e.g., a large number of recipients. Towards this end, distribution lists, or “mailing lists” in an electronic document context such as E-mail, have been developed to facilitate grouping and tracking recipients.
A key in the ability to mass distribute information is the distribution list. The creation of these lists can be a tedious and/or complex manual task, since there may be many list members requiring processing for entry on to the list. Some of these lists are manually created and other lists are automatically created based on characteristics of an environment, e.g., a “customers” list may refer to all customers of a computing system. However, regardless of how the list is created, on occasion it may be useful to send data to only some members of a particular distribution list, rather than all members or class of members of the list. Similarly, it may be useful to aggregate several distribution lists, which may have been manually, or automatically determined, and then exclude some members or class of members from the combination of lists.
To send messages to a portion but not all of a distribution list, usually a subtractive message is performed based at least in part on an intersection of various distribution lists to determine, if only temporarily, a new distribution list for a message. A particular distribution list may respectively be combined or intersected with an additive or a subtractive distribution list. Thus, for example, an e-mail message may be addressed to a distribution list for all employees, but where a subtractive list is applied to remove certain employees from receiving the e-mail message. The distribution list for all employees need not be altered.
Traditional static distribution lists and dynamic distribution lists do not provide the features commonly needed in a multitude of usage scenarios. Static distribution lists consist of predefined group names with manually added email addresses as the group members. Dynamic distribution lists are lists that are generated by performing a look-up in a directory on some common key. There are several usages of distribution lists that are not efficiently addressed using present static or dynamic distribution lists. The present state of distribution lists does not provide the following functionality: (1) Permanent and temporary modification of static distribution lists from a message destination field; (2) Temporary modification of static or dynamic distribution lists with a temporal restriction from a message destination field; and (3) Creation of temporary or permanent distribution lists by combining static or dynamic distribution lists using a variety of mathematical, logical and programmable operations, and temporal restriction.
Current technology has addressed the problem of modifying distribution lists. U.S. patent application, publication number 2005/0010645 provides a method in which additive and subtractive message operations can be performed on a distribution list based at least in part on an intersection of various distribution lists to determine, if only temporarily, a new distribution list for a message. A particular distribution list may respectively be combined or intersected with an additive or a subtractive distribution list. Thus, for example, an e-mail message may be addressed to a distribution list for all employees, but where a subtractive list is applied to remove certain employees from receiving the e-mail message. The distribution list for all employees need not be altered. Although this method does provide a means to modify a distribution list, this method is limited and does not provide any features to temporarily alter an existing distribution list that lasts for a given period of time according to the user's will. For example, if Mary Joe is having a leave of absence for 1 year, and she does not need to be on the “Women Network” distribution list for 1 year, this referenced invention does not provide a solution to address this problem. Instead, it would need to create a subtraction distribution list that contains Mary Joe as the only member and then perform the subtraction of the subtraction distribution list from the “Women Network” distribution list. If a user needs to send emails to the Women Network multiple times, this subtraction operation is needed to be performed by the user every time when he/she sends the email to the “Women Network”. It is not flexible and troublesome to do so if the frequency of emailing the “Women Network” increases. On the other hand, the user has to manually manage the subtraction distribution list, or it would waste extra disk space to store it if the user does not need this subtraction distribution list anymore. It does not manage any duration of distribution lists. Also, this method does not provide the means for incorporating dynamic decision-making capabilities for determining whether to save a newly generated distribution list.
There remains a need for an advanced method for generating flexible and adaptive distribution lists to fit different daily situations, allowing the user to dynamically determine whether to store either temporarily or permanently the newly created distribution list with an easy to use user-interface, and freeing them the effort of manually managing the duration of the distribution lists.